New developments and curiosities from a changing global media landscape: People, Spaces, Deliberation brings trends and events to your attention that illustrate that tomorrow's media environment will look very different from today's, and will have little resemblance to yesterday's.

In recent years, as the number of mobile-cellular subscriptions surpassed 7.1 billion and mobile network population coverage approached close to 95%, growth in mobile subscriptions has greatly exceeded the growth in fixed connections, especially in developing countries. For many low-income groups, mobile devices are their only window to internet access.

The tremendous growth has not only contributed to greater access rates, but also to a fall in prices of mobile-cellular services around the world as providers seek to be competitive. Over the past year, the decrease in mobile-broadband prices worldwide made it, on average, 20 – 30% more affordable. In least developed countries (LDCs), the mobile-cellular price basket continued to fall to 14% of GNI per capita by the end of 2014, compared with 29% in 2010.

Nevertheless, as the following graph from Measuring the Information Society Report 2015 by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) illustrates, LDCs have a long way to go in order to achieve affordable mobile-broadband packages. The graph shows, the average prices for pre- and post-paid broadband connections on computers and mobile devices, as measured against monthly GNI per capita, in 2013 and 2014.

Among the options, prepaid mobile-broadband is the most affordable. In this context, it will be important for broadband providers to offer more new services and packages for low-income groups, such as allowing users to buy data in small volumes.

Heading to my first African Mining Indaba in Cape Town, South Africa recently, I was wondering how receptive mining companies would be to the idea of greater partnership given that commodity prices were at historic lows. While there was some hesitation from isolated voices, the overwhelming consensus was, YES, partnerships that promote shared benefits are critical to the sector in both the good times and the bad.
The key in this commodities downturn is to develop win-win partnerships. A central theme at Indaba was the importance of hiring and training local people, and increasing the focus on local procurement which, in turn, helps diversify local economies through linkages to mines’ supply chains. Best practices in training for small and medium-sized enterprises in health, safety, environmental and quality standards were highlighted as well as initiatives to ensure women share in the benefits flowing from mining evenly.

Collaboration is also key to ensuring that the power generated for mining in Africa benefits communities. Power-mining integration is essential when you consider that Sub-Saharan Africa today only generates 80 gigawatts of power each year for 48 countries and a population of 1.1 billion people. Two-thirds of people in the region live entirely without electricity and those with a power connection suffer constant disruptions in supply. Without new investment and with current rates of population growth, there will be more Africans without power by 2030 than there are now.

(Note: China and India were broken out in this graph due to the distorting effect of their populations on the estimations per region.)

According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), broadband can be considered affordable when it is at or below five percent of the average monthly income[1]. Statistics are usually reported on country averages; under a “Broadband for All” objective, it might be useful to realize that behind averages income is distributed unevenly among the population of a country. That is, even if broadband prices are effectively under five percent of the average monthly income of a country, that same price indeed represents a higher share of the income of the poorest segments of the population.

In this blog post, I will try to show the differences that averages hide, as well as highlight the importance of addressing specific segments of the population, especially when dealing with the bottom 40 percent of the population, which are – almost by definition – usually underestimated on average.

Using statistics from ITU and World Development Indicators (WDI), I have tried to calculate (grossly and certainly with lots of room for improvement) a tool to measure this “affordability gap” between countries and – more importantly – within countries.

Mr. Julio Lopes, Secretary of Transport of the State of Rio de Janeiro, recently visited the World Bank to present what the city is doing to improve the quality of public transport. It is a fascinating example of how cities can improve urban transport, with a clear target of benefiting the poor and reducing a city’s carbon footprint.

The spread of the mobile telephone over the past decade has been nothing short of a revolution. According to market tracking firm Wireless Intelligence, in September 1999 there were about 340 million mobile telephone subscriptions worldwide. Ten years hence, that is less than the number of subscriptions in India or China alone, and worldwide the number has grown to 4.5 billion. There are valuable lessons from this revolution for the transformation we are hoping to see in broadband access and use.